


Beginnings

by weiwardwriter



Series: Freefall [1]
Category: Club Penguin
Genre: Club Penguin Times, Gen, PSA-era, Penguin Secret Agency, Puffles - Freeform, Recruitment, Social Anxiety, Spies & Secret Agents, Technology, wei's perpetual inner monologue: "o fuck (exit hamlet)"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:48:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24519481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weiwardwriter/pseuds/weiwardwriter
Summary: In her head, a quiet voice that sounded a bit like her last girlfriend’s asked if maybe she was being a tad overdramatic about what was probably just a prank being played on her.Sagging back in her chair, Wei shook her head furiously to clear it. Mere pranks couldn’t just — just shut down someone’s laptop remotely, or identify exactly who she was from a single blurry photo taken by her webcam.She wondered, a little wildly, if she ought to start running through her old Card-jitsu katas just in case.(Or: the story of one agent's unconventional recruitment to the PSA.)
Series: Freefall [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1771960
Kudos: 11





	Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> yep, this is Club Penguin fanfic.

“Fishsticks,” Wei muttered, prodding at the stubborn image scan on her laptop that simply refused to un-pixelate. “Come on, you old thing. Why won’t you load?”

She clicked a few keys decisively and pressed ‘Enter’. The image juddered, somehow pixelated _even more_ , and then the entire webpage crashed, showing only a grey, sad-looking error icon on-screen with a blue **?** in its centre. Wei clutched at her hair and resisted the urge to shriek, but it was a near thing. 

It was no use. If she wanted any chance of finishing her work before midnight tonight, she would have to return to her tiny desk at the Club Penguin Times offices, where the internet was reliable but which was also _busy_ and _crowded_ and _clamouring_ with penguins to the point that her flippers started to shake just at the thought of it. 

Wei closed her eyes and swore under her breath. _This is impossible. I can’t get into a panic every time I enter my own place of work._

Her laptop beeped feebly at her, announcing the imminent decline of both her battery percentage and continued will to live. Wei cursed again and fumbled her laptop into her arms, pulling the charging cable from her bag and casting around frantically for an outlet. The Book Room, it seemed, was allergic not only to reliable internet but also to basic technology as a whole; the only outlet in sight was already fully occupied by both an ancient, sputtering lamp and a small black box with a blinking red light in one corner. With a muttered “sorry”, Wei unplugged the dying lamp and replaced it with her laptop’s charging cable. At the very least, waiting for her laptop to charge up would give her time to mentally brace herself before she had to return to the office.

Wei sat on the floor with a bump and a sigh, and something knocked against her flipper. She twisted around, and saw she had narrowly avoided sitting on that little black box with the blinking red light which still occupied the second plug of the electrical outlet. Even with her stomach growling with hunger (she’d missed lunch) and her overtaxed brain making her thoughts lag more than usual, it should’ve occurred to her sooner that this black box was, in fact, a router. An internet router, to be precise.

Wei’s eyes widened. She reached out for the router, but then withdrew. She was in the Book Room above the _very public_ Coffee Shop, not in her own igloo, for crying out loud. She couldn’t just — just poke around other folks’ electronics without asking permission first! Even if she was, for the moment, completely alone and unobserved in the room… and even if said electronic was sitting _right there_ , blinking tantalizingly up at her as though pleading to be fixed…

Wei’s flipper twitched again in the direction of the router. All she wanted to do was fix the Book Room’s terrible internet. Surely there would be no harm in that.

Wei didn’t consider her technological knowledge to be that remarkable, all things considered. Certainly not even close to the realm of penguins like Gary the Gadget Guy, whose inventions held an undercurrent of genius that she could never possibly hope to understand. That being said, Wei had picked up one or two tricks over the years, and these had eventually allowed her to develop her own Methods for doing things. Said Methods weren’t _illegal_ , exactly, but they could occasionally be a little… flexible. One of these Methods included the program she began to boot up on her laptop, even as she connected her laptop to the router with a second cable from her bag. She had written this program herself several years back, to improve the internet at the workplace of a friend whose boss had refused to hire a technician to fix their network connectivity issues, and it only required a few more tweaks in code before it began scanning through the Book Room’s router as easily as picking o’berries. It took a few minutes longer to gain access to the router’s configuration, which Wei accomplished with a few guilty glances over her shoulder toward the still-closed door of the Book Room.

“Sorry,” she muttered again to no one in particular. “I promise I just want to make the network run faster. Even the Dojo has better internet than this.”

 _Ding_. The program wrapped up its final processes and obediently closed itself with a self-satisfied air. In her other window, Wei could see the previously crashed webpage reloading, now much, much faster than before. She allowed herself a little fist-pump of victory.

Which was promptly cut short when her entire screen froze, went grey, and proceeded to throw up several glaring error windows all over the display. 

“Oh, no, no, no, no, _no_ ,” she yelped, tapping desperately at the keys. “What’s wrong with you _now?”_

The screen flickered. She could practically hear the fans on her poor laptop strain with the effort of preventing it from overheating. _This is a straightforward process,_ she thought with dismay as her laptop’s memory nearly overflowed despite her frantic efforts. _Or at least it_ should _be!_

Then as suddenly as it had begun, the blowup stopped. No further error windows appeared, and her screen only lagged slightly when she tentatively tested a few keys. The laptop fans died down to their usual quiet hum.

Only… something was different. When she checked, her laptop memory was still fuller than it should’ve been, and it didn’t take long for her to discover the reason why: a program that had _definitely_ not been present before was now running itself innocuously on her laptop, like a small but stubborn snow-leech sucking away at her RAM.

Wei’s eyes narrowed. She tested the internet, and found that it was running as smoothly as expected.

So this was the reason why the internet connection had been so terrible. Not merely because of a faulty router, but because someone had — had somehow installed a _secret program_ onto said router, where it had stayed for who knew how long, eating away at the extra space and mangling the system into an unusable mess. 

But who on the island would do such a thing, and why? A penguin playing a prank? Or someone with more malicious intentions — someone trying to steal information, perhaps, or install malware or even spyware on unknowing penguins’ devices if they tried to use the Coffee Shop’s public internet? 

Wei would be the first to admit that she had something of a vivid imagination, but this seemed _off_ in a way that genuinely unsettled her. Her suspicions only grew when she attempted to open this strange program, only to discover the file was heavily encrypted — and it was no amateur’s work, either. 

“Alright, then,” she said under her breath, squinting at the numbers on screen. “You want to play this game with me, jerk? Then let’s play.”

She hadn’t done anything like this in ages. Not since she was still in school at least, and eager to push the boundaries of her technological capabilities. But like many of Wei’s more dubious Methods, once learnt, it proved to be a hard one to forget. It took her quite a few attempts to suss out the full thirty-two digit encryption key, even with her computer making full use of its ability to compute, but after what seemed like an interminably long time, the firewall collapsed beneath her assault like a stubborn snow-fort finally being knocked over.

“Got you,” Wei murmured triumphantly. The mysterious program sure looked malware-y enough, even after being decrypted, but she had her own ways of protecting her computer from harm. She moused over to the file and opened it with a decisive _click_.

She was expecting anything from irritating advertisements to a virus’s game attempt at deleting her files. What she was decidedly _not_ expecting was for a nonsense slew of squares dotted with circles and Xs to suddenly shoot across the screen, followed by her own startled face staring back at her from the monitor. With a furious squawk, she scrambled to cover her webcam with one flipper, but already there was large text blinking into existence above the image of her face, this time in readable letters:

 **NAME:** ANWEI 

**STATUS:** CIVILIAN 

**ERROR 403 — ACCESS DENIED**

**LOCK DOWN FOREIGN DEVICE IMMEDIATELY.**

_What do you mean,_ lock down _— !!!_

Wei’s laptop screen suddenly flared with an eye-searingly blue light, so bright that she was forced to shield her eyes. Then, with a fatal-sounding whine, the display sputtered, spasmed, and slowly died out, leaving Wei still sitting on the floor of the Book Room, gaping silently at her unresponsive laptop.  
  
  


* * *

Wei did not sleep well that night.

She was too anxious to eat more than a few bites of dinner, and when ten o’clock rolled around, she found herself turning on all the lights in her igloo and triple-checking the locks on her doors and windows. Her laptop, which she had firmly closed and weighed down with a heavy book for good measure, sat in the centre of her cleared-out desk where she could keep a close eye on it. Then she dragged a chair into the foyer so she could sit and guard the front door, phone in flipper and poised to call… _somebody_ , should anyone try to break in, or something.

In her head, a quiet voice that sounded a bit like her last girlfriend’s asked if _maybe_ she was being a tad overdramatic about what was probably just a prank being played on her.

Sagging back in her chair, Wei shook her head furiously to clear it. Mere pranks couldn’t just — just shut down someone’s laptop remotely, or identify exactly who she was from a single blurry photo taken by her webcam.

She wondered, a little wildly, if she ought to start running through her old Card-jitsu katas just in case.

An hour passed; then another, then another. Despite herself, Wei’s eyelids were growing heavy by around three in the morning, and before she knew it, she was startling awake in her chair when her usual seven a.m. work alarm rang shrilly from her bedroom.

In her lap, her white puffle Ai squeaked indignantly at this disturbance before flouncing off in a huff. Meanwhile, Crown, Wei’s second puffle, had somehow found her way on top of her desk and was now rubbing her furry face against the still-closed laptop. 

“Get away from that,” Wei muttered, staggering over to her desk and scooping Crown into her arms. “That might not be safe.”

Crown chirruped and head-butted Wei’s face affectionately. At the other end of her igloo, Ai began to demand for her breakfast with loud, imperious squeaks. Wei sighed, and despite the prospect of confronting her massive unfinished workload thanks to her laptop _practically imploding_ the day before, the tight knot in her chest finally loosened somewhat. 

“I guess it does seem silly to think about now, huh,” she said to Crown, ruffling the yellow puffle’s fur. Crown tolerated the cuddle for a few moments longer before she squirmed free and hopped over to join Ai by the food bowls.

In spite of her restless night, the brisk morning air revived Wei somewhat when she finally stepped out her front door. Her spirits only continued to rise when she encountered no unpleasant surprises during her walk to the local branch of the Club Penguin Times offices. Today was Friday, the day after the weekly issue was released, and therefore it was the day when her workplace was at its emptiest. It was, in turn, Wei’s favourite day of the week to work, for it meant she had to endure the barest minimum of social interaction possible. 

So it was that Wei became relaxed enough to hum along to the tune on her MP3000 as she pushed open the doors to the front lobby. But she stopped short at the entrance when she noticed several things at once:

  1. The usual receptionist was gone, and standing by the front desk instead were three penguins who, eerily, all turned around at the same time to look at her when she walked in.
  2. One of these penguins was _Aunt Arctic herself_ , even though the Club Penguin Times editing offices were located on the other side of the island, and:  
  

  3. One of the other two penguins, wearing a black suit and dark sunglasses like something straight out of ‘Penguins in Black’, stepped forward, half-opened her jacket to reveal a shiny emblem pinned to her lapel, and said in a calm voice,



“Are you Anwei, the employee from the Archives Department? We need you to come with us.”

* * *

“So let me get this straight,” the suited penguin said slowly.

 _I’m not,_ Wei’s brain supplied uselessly. She kept her beak shut.

“You located and _broke into_ a PSA Level 5 High-Security Clearance Server… because you were trying to fix the internet in the Coffee Shop.”

“In the Book Room, actually,” Wei said in a small voice. “And it was an accident.”

The heating was turned on in the small basement room where the three of them currently sat, but Wei’s flippers were ice-cold all the same. She clasped them in her lap to keep them still. She had been placed into a chair in front of a dusty, unused office desk, while the other two penguins sat behind the desk in their own chairs, facing her. The black-suited penguin must have sensed Wei’s nervousness, for she visibly softened before speaking once more.

“Again, you’re not in any trouble, Wei,” the suited penguin said gently. Wei kept her eyes fixed on the nametag pinned to the other penguin’s blazer, which only read ‘S’. “We know you didn’t mean anything malicious by it. All we want to know is _how_ you were able to do it.”

At that, the brown penguin accompanying S snorted and kicked their feet up over the arm of their chair, looking for all the world like they were lounging on a sofa in the Ski Lodge instead of crammed into a wooden chair in a dank little basement of the Club Penguin Times offices. 

“And don’t give us any of that nonsense about it being an accident,” they drawled. “The day some penguin can bypass G’s security _by accident_ is the day puffles sprout wings and fly.”

S turned around to give the brown penguin a truly withering glare that was obvious even under those impenetrable sunglasses. “ _Not_ helping, Zed,” she hissed.

Zed stuck their tongue out at her, and S scowled back. Watching them now, the two penguins could not be more diametrically opposed; S sitting primly in her neatly buttoned-up suit and tie, and Zed slouched over in a comfortably worn pink hoodie with a blue baseball cap turned sideways on their head. And yet the way in which the two of them interacted, like squabbling siblings who had known each other from the egg, was just so _mundane_ that Wei began to relax, despite herself.

“It really was an accident,” she said. The other two halted their staredown immediately to refocus on her. Wei resisted the urge to shrink back.

“I mean,” she stammered, “I honestly had no idea what I was looking at when I found it. I thought it was a virus, at first.”

Zed sat up and raised an eyebrow. “You thought it was a virus and you _still_ opened it?”

Wei fidgeted. “Well, yeah. I couldn’t just — _leave_ it there, and let some other poor penguin who came after me get their account information stolen, or something.”

S and Zed were silent. Wei tried to elaborate. “I know how to protect my own data from most cyberattacks, so I thought it’d be best if I, er, extracted the corrupt files and dismantled them so they wouldn’t hurt anyone else. Only, when I opened the file, _that_ happened.” Wei gestured at her laptop sitting on the desk, which was open and turned toward the other two penguins but still without power. “And, um. I guess you know what happened next.”

“...right.” S exchanged a look with Zed. “You still haven’t told us how you were able to break the encryption on the server.”

Wei couldn’t help but bristle a little. “I used my own decryption program. But I can’t exactly show you how I did it with my laptop like _that_ , can I?”

“So she does have a backbone,” Zed said, sounding amused. They reached a flipper into their hoodie pocket, pulled out a battered blue phone, and held it up to their ear. “Everything’s good, folks,” they said into the phone unexpectedly. “You can let up now.”

There was no reply that Wei could discern, but Zed tucked the phone back into their hoodie and waved at Wei’s laptop. “Go ahead, you can open it now. I’ve told HQ that they could transfer control back to you.”

No part of that sentence made any sense to Wei, but the startled way in which S jerked and whipped around to face Zed was telling. “ _Zed,_ ” she whispered. Then, with a significant glance back at Wei, S visibly calmed herself and said stiffly to Zed, “Agent, may I have a word with you outside?”

“Bit late for that now, I think,” Zed said dryly, and Wei tried not to look like she’d been listening too obviously. “C’mon, Sash,” they went on, nudging S/Sash/??? in the shoulder. “You heard what G said. This is too good of an opportunity to waste.” Then to Wei, good-naturedly, “Open up that laptop for us, would you?”

“This is remarkable,” S murmured some time later, with no sign of her previous reservations. She scanned avidly through the programming code that Wei had pulled up on the screen of her now miraculously-restored laptop. “May I…” Her flipper hovered over the keyboard, and Wei nodded, recognizing the fervour of a fellow nerd who desperately wanted to take a closer look at the Cool Thing in front of them — not that she ever would have considered one of her own programs to be “cool”. S immediately took off those dark sunglasses and pulled the laptop closer to her, leaning toward the screen.

“The code is a little disorganized,” Wei said nervously. She jumped when Zed clapped a flipper to her shoulder.

“No use talking to her for a while, I’m afraid,” they said cheerfully as S began to write fervently in a small notebook she pulled from her jacket, eyes still fixed to the laptop screen. “When she gets like this, everything goes in one ear and right out the other.”

“Shut up,” S said without looking up.

Zed smirked, but steered Wei aside. “I actually wanted to talk to you about something else,” they said, leaning against the wall and crossing their flippers. “You probably have a lot of questions.”

“I’ll say.” Wei shook her head vigorously, then burst out, “Who even _are_ you? Why are you questioning me like this? How did you take over my computer and what was that program I opened and what does any of it have to do with me?”

Zed held up their flippers. “Whoa, slow down. One question at a time, please.”

Wei breathed out slowly. “Fine. Who are you?”

Zed grinned. “Well, that’s easy enough. I’m Zed, and the penguin with the stick down her collar over there is S. Not our real names, of course, but we can tell those to you, too, soon enough. We’re members of an organization called the PSA.”

“You mentioned that… PSA thing before,” Wei said, gathering her thoughts. “What is it?”

“Let’s just say we’re a specialized, anonymous group dedicated to protecting the island from harm.” Zed reached into their pocket and pulled out a slightly more scuffed-up version of that same shiny emblem S had shown her earlier. They passed it to Wei, who examined it closely. “Most of the island leaders and mascots are aware of our existence, including your boss, Aunt Arctic, though we generally prefer to keep out of sight of the general public.”

“Wait.” Wei looked up. “You know Aunt Arctic?”

Zed shrugged. “Not personally. More like she knows _of_ us, really. She’s not a member of the PSA, of course, but she demanded to see our identification before she let us speak with you. Nice lady.”

“Oh,” Wei said, a bit faintly. She had only met Aunt Arctic once before this, during a party to celebrate the publication of the 100th edition of the Club Penguin Times, and even then, she’d only had the courage to stammer out a quick ‘hello’ before bolting. The thought that Aunt Arctic would go through all that trouble, just to protect an employee she probably didn’t even remember meeting, was a little staggering, though Wei was grateful for it. _I ought to send her a fish basket or something as thanks_. 

“Which brings me to my next point.” Zed gave Wei an unexpectedly piercing look. “What you did with that program in the Book Room… you really shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Wei glared at them a little. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What Zed means is that the encryption on that program was designed to be foolproof,” S said, suddenly appearing at Zed’s shoulder. She paged through her notebook with a scrutinizing eye. “There are only a few penguins on the island that we know of who are capable of that level of decoding expertise, and all four of them are in the employ of the PSA. Heck, G and K were the ones who wrote that encryption in the first place.” S looked up at Wei, and surprisingly, she smiled. “And then you turned up.”

“Um,” Wei said. “Sorry about that?”

“No, you don’t need to apologize. Quite the opposite, actually.” S stepped forward and held out a file toward Wei. Hesitantly, Wei accepted it, running her flipper over the word **CLASSIFIED** stamped in red on the cover. 

“You possess a number of skills that the Penguin Secret Agency would find quite useful for a number of reasons,” S said, refocusing Wei’s attention on her. “And we sought you out today because we’d like to offer you a position.”

Wei blinked, then shook herself. She didn’t have water in her ears, did she? “I’m sorry — a position?” Wei repeated. “You mean, like — like a job? At this Penguin Secret… thing?”

“Yep,” Zed said.

Wei opened her beak, then closed it. “But —” she floundered. “But I already have a job here, with the Club Penguin Times!”

“We’re not saying you have to quit your position here at the newspaper,” S hastened to assure her. “Most of us work regular jobs in our civilian lives. Agency work is usually assigned on an on-call basis, so there’s plenty of downtime between assignments.”

“The PSA’s probably most interested in hiring you as a consultant, anyway,” Zed added. “That’s, like, one assignment every six months, tops. And the pay’s not half-bad, either—”

“Not to mention,” S said loudly, interrupting Zed with a glare, “You would be helping us keep the island safe from threats of all kinds.”

Wei stared down at the file in her flippers. She eased the cover back, and her own name gazed up at her in bold black letters from the page inside. 

“Take some time to think about it,” S said more gently. “No hard feelings if you decide the job’s not for you, but if you _are_ interested, all the information’s there in the file.”

Wei could only stand there and continue to stare blankly down, the gears in her mind whirring away frantically. Eventually the other two penguins stepped away and began gathering their things, leaving Wei’s laptop still open on the desk.

“Wait,” Wei heard herself say before S and Zed could leave for good. The scuff of their feet paused at the other end of the room. 

“You still haven’t told me what that server was for,” she said, not looking up from the file. “The one I accidentally opened, I mean. Why was it in a router in the Book Room, of all places?”

There was a pause, then an amused chuckle. “If you must know, it’s part of a series of secure PSA servers hidden in select locations around the island,” Zed said. “In the event that the computer mainframe at Headquarters is compromised, our most sensitive information can still be kept safe and accessible by our agents, if they know where to look.”

“The server that you accessed is a bit of a… special case, though,” S said. She sounded a little exasperated. “The Book Room was already ruled out by our tech division as being too public of a space to be truly secure, so its server was left empty, only to be used in the worst of emergencies.”

Wei was finally able to drag her eyes from the file to S and Zed hovering at the door. “But it wasn’t empty,” she said, confused.

Zed looked like they were holding back a laugh, and S sighed. “As it turns out, one of our agents thought that a secure PSA server which had been mostly discarded by the agency as useless would be a _grand_ place to store his family’s top-secret fish recipes,” she said dryly. “The penguins on duty yesterday were just as surprised as you were to be notified of a security breach taking place in a supposedly empty server.”

“The agent responsible for misusing the server has already been reprimanded,” Zed added, snickering. “You should’ve seen his face when he learned of what happened from the Director themself.”

“More worried for his job, or for the sanctity of his oh-so-important apple-fish pie?” S muttered to Zed as the two of them left the room. The door clicked shut before Wei could hear any more of their ensuing conversation, but Zed’s laugh echoed loudly down the hall. 

* * *

“This is crazy,” Wei said to a sleeping Ai later that day back at her igloo. (Aunt Arctic had taken one look at her after her conversation with S and Zed and immediately given her the rest of the day off, much to Wei’s relief.)

“This is just absolutely ridiculous,” Wei continued, petting Ai’s fur a little desperately. “I don’t even know who these penguins are. I shouldn’t want to join their weird little secret club and weird secret ways, even if their technology is incredible and like nothing I’ve ever seen before in my life.”

Ai’s only response was a snore. On the coffee table in front of them, Crown hopped over the scattered pages of the file that Wei had spread out and read and reread countless times over the past several hours. 

Wei stared at Crown. Crown stared back and let out a questioning squeak. Wei sighed.

“Oh, what the hell,” she said, and reached for the phone. 

The penguin on the other end picked up after two rings. “Hello, you’ve reached the Sports Shop in the Ski Village,” they said cheerfully. “How can I help you today?”

“Um.” Wei glanced at the file in front of her. “I think the password is, ‘G has forty-five pairs of socks.’”

**Author's Note:**

> More fics featuring Wei will be written soon, this time featuring a lot more of the island mascots we know and love. 
> 
> Comments and constructive criticism are always greatly appreciated. <3 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
